Hide Her (The Erodium Trilogy Book 2) Page 15

  The roads got narrow, bumpy, dusty, until the cab turned down a dirt driveway, that was eerily similar to the route to A-Cad, a single lane she’d only ever gone down twice, first when she was six, again when she was eighteen.

  She knew she was headed in the right direction when she spotted snipers in the trees, then soldiers manning the road. The cab pulled up at the checkpoint and she rolled the window down.

  “Robin Wray,” she told the soldier that met the cab, assault rifle hanging from his neck, hands balanced on the stock and barrel.

  “ID?”

  Robin pulled her license. Normally she’d flash her badge but she’d left that with Forrest when she quit the NIF. Or when he let her go. She still wasn’t sure what happened. Who gave up on who.

  “Half a mile down,” the soldier said. “Cabin, lake. Can’t miss it.”

  So that’s where she was headed. The address had to be the same cabin on the lake from the picture in the Oval Office, backing the snapshot of Lyla digging for worms and Molly holding a fishing rod.

  The further she got from the checkpoint the more the security thinned, until she no longer saw soldiers, only a gravel drive fringed by woodlands. She rolled down the window and huffed the air. Moss, pine, bark. The tires crunched over dry leaves, beckoned down from limp branches by autumn. Somewhere, a bird chirped. The road mutated into a circular driveway around a great dead elephantine tree, behind which sat a cabin on a lake. It looked just like it had in the picture. A wraparound porch and a few rocking chairs, some windows that reached the roof, a stone chimney exposed to the elements top to bottom, rising from the grass like a mythological finger. Alongside an elegant wood door, a Secret Service agent stood guard. Mac. Shades covering his eyes. Suit covering his body. Hands folded in front.

  She got out, the forest weirdly feeling like it had been paused even though she was moving, and walked up the porch steps. Worn wood, dark brown. Cracks in the planks, squeaks where she stepped, the head of a nail sticking out an inch.

  “Detective,” Mac said.

  “Agent,” Robin said.

  “I need your weapon.”

  “Really?”

  “Those are the rules,” he said.

  “I think we’re well beyond rules at this point.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Hand it over.”

  “No can do,” she said.

  Mac shook his head. “Why do you always have to be such a bitch?”

  “Why do you always have to be such a dick?”

  “If you won’t give it then I’ll take it.”

  “No need,” Robin said, assembling a bluff. “I can just turn back and leak your name to the press. This address too. See what else I give them. Let the media do the digging.”

  From the look of his jaw and lips she thought he might scream. “Fine. Keep it. See if I care.”

  “Thank you kindly.”

  “You’re not at all fucking welcome. You’ve made my life a living hell.”

  “Maybe you did that yourself,” she said.

  “Right.”

  “You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

  “We’d always planned for this possibility,” he said.

  “We?”

  “Best go inside. See what you came for so you can head the other way and forget everything you know.” He looked away and she wished she could see his eyes.

  “You don’t look so good, Mac.” The irony wasn’t lost on her, she looked worse than he did, but it was true. She looked bad, he looked bad. The whole world and everyone in it looked like they’d lasted twelve rounds in the ring.

  He shook his head. “I never wanted any of this.”

  “I believe you,” she said.

  He remained stolid, blocked by shades, chiseled from stone, a person in a painting, unchanging for all time.

  Robin grabbed the handle on the door, paused, then twisted it open and stepped inside.

  President Molly Walker, sitting on the floor, her back leaned against a couch. Blue jeans, white blouse, bare feet. Her grey roots were coming at her temple.

  Then the girl. Lyla Walker.

  Alive.

  Curly hair tied in a ponytail, gums missing a few teeth, denim overalls layered over a white shirt, mismatched socks on tiny feet, the girl sitting between the splayed legs of her grandmother, turning the pages of a big thin book, held in both their hands.

  “All grown-ups were once children,” the President read to the girl, “but only few of them remember it.”

  Then the President looked up from the book. “Detective.”

  “Madam President.” Robin didn’t know what else to say. Seeing the girl, here, now, was like experiencing a dream with full consciousness.

  She found her.

  The President looked down at Lyla. “Sweetie, why don’t you go to your room and start that big book I said we’d read one day.”

  Lyla knew something was up, clearly, Robin could tell from the way the girl looked at her as she climbed to her feet, nervous, curious, grabbing her bowl of crackers and heading for a door on the right side of the living room but stopping to turn and look at Robin, fixing her with a stare she’d never forget, like looking into her own eyes three decades ago, before heading into the bedroom and shutting the door.

  “So,” the President said. “I suppose you want to know what’s going on.”

  “I want the truth,” Robin said, “that’s it.”

  “Don’t we all.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  The President sighed, stuffed her hands in her pockets, paced the living room, stopped at the windows lining the back wall of the cabin, watched the surface of the lake ripple in the wind. The patrol was identical to the one she walked in the Oval Office, when she planted herself at the windows looking out onto the lawn.

  “You can frag things how far back Detective, a few weeks?”

  “Usually,” Robin said. “Once I was able to reach back a month.”

  “What if you could reach back as far as you wanted? Touch someone or something and see an entire history. All that had ever happened.”

  “Then I’d say you’re a liar, and a bad one at that,” Robin said.

  “I wish you were right,” the President whispered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “My granddaughter. She’s one of you. You know this, I know this, and I applaud your detective work. But do you also know how high she scored on her Erodium test? They said she broke the meter. In fact, it was such an unprecedented accomplishment, that in records I have only recently obtained, only nine children in the last thirty years, worldwide, have managed to do the same.”

  “Okay, so she’s good at what I do, great even,” Robin said, pushing aside the implications of a frag as gifted as Lyla. “Why kidnap her? Fake her death? Lie to the world?”

  “I had the money to pay out of pocket for the neural device that would allow her to control her Erodium mutation. The thing that would make her normal.”

  “She was normal. She didn’t need a hunk of electronics in her brain for that to be true.”

  “She did if she wanted to live, and to live well. To touch others, to know love. Without it she’d go insane. You know this. Don’t argue with yourself.” The President had an uncanny ability to make Robin feel like a girl being scolded in school, a normal school, where the kids wore whatever and had recess and never once had to touch a gun. “Shortly after the procedure, I caught an unfamiliar Secret Service agent about to enter her room.”

  “I don’t understand,” Robin said.

  “A day later, I received whispers through unofficial channels about a classified government program gathering frags.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. We already have the NIF.”

  “We do, but we have frags like you, not frags like her.” The President looked at the closed bedroom door. “Before her, nine in the entire world. Imagine the kind of power you could wield if you could frag the entire past of anyone or anything.”

  “I’d
rather not,” Robin said.

  “The tragic twist is that those nine children all went missing.”

  It sounded like a conspiracy, but her own conspiracy had turned out to be true. “Your point?”

  “Those nine children were kidnapped by a heavily classified program with an unknown purpose,” the President said.

  “And the people who run this program were coming for her. Your granddaughter.”

  “Yes. The only problem was, she was the granddaughter of the President of the United States.”

  “Who knew privilege was a thing,” Robin said.

  “I will never apologize for the power my position affords me. Ever. Too many women have done that throughout history. I won’t have it.”

  “You kidnapped her to save her.”

  “Yes,” the President said.

  “How?”

  “You won’t believe me.”

  “Try me,” Robin said.

  “The FLF.”

  Robin laughed. The Frag Liberation Front. It made sense. In some ways it was the only possible answer. The intelligence community, the FBI, the CIA, they’d all been right. The President was the liar all along.

  “A tenuous alliance, I know,” the President said, “but in times like these, you take every friend you can get.”

  “I had no idea you could be friends with terrorists.”

  “Save your petty barbs for someone who understands the world less than I do. My granddaughter is safe. I did what had to be done, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

  Robin felt like the President had drilled her into the floorboards. She couldn’t tell if she was loaded with compliance or anger. An anchor or a spring. Ready to sink or explode.

  “And the vial?” Robin asked.

  “The FLF. It’s breakthrough technology, so new they don’t even understand the full scope of its effects, not yet, but we couldn’t afford for you to find her.”

  “Mac. He knew everything.”

  “Yes,” the President said. “And he sacrificed.”

  Now Robin understood. Everything she’d found on the hunt for Lyla Walker could be sorted into two categories. True and false, light and dark, buried and unburied. She wasn’t supposed to be here.

  “There had to have been some greater plan,” Robin said, “some way to stop this from happening at all. The kids being kidnapped.”

  “There is. In fact I’ve already been working on it, pulling records, finding out where the money comes from and who runs the damn thing.”

  “You’re the President and you can’t find out who runs what?”

  “I didn’t peg you as naive.”

  “So your plan is to dismantle the program from the inside?”

  “Yes,” the President said.

  “Why not come out with the truth? Show the world what’s happening to kids like your granddaughter?”

  The President turned back to the window.

  “You’re guilty as hell,” Robin said, thinking back to the bill Representative Molly Walker had passed all those years ago. WASA, the Walker American Supremacy Act, the entire foundation of the National Institute for Frags. “You did this.”

  “And what exactly is this?” the President asked.

  “You may not have started this classified program but you opened the door that led to it.”

  “I will dismantle the program and return the children to their homes and it will all be like none of it ever happened.”

  “You want to bury it,” Robin said.

  “No.”

  “You want to bury it because you can’t admit that you made a fucking mistake.”

  “There is no such thing as a mistake,” the President said. “Only actions and consequences.”

  “Must put you to sleep pretty quick at night.”

  “When you’re the most powerful woman in the world, it helps.”

  “How does China fit into all this?” Robin asked.

  “It was the one request of the FLF in our agreement. All they asked was that we framed China for the crime. I’ll admit, at first, I was surprised, but the more I sat with it the more I realized the FLF was a useful pawn in the right spot at the right time. We’ve been on the brink of war with China for decades now. Us falling, them rising. It’s inevitable. Look at history. All colliding superpowers go to war. I just escalated the timeline to end the charade of peace. Plus I nixed them from the negotiating table for colonization rights to the moon. The country that controls the rock up there controls the next century of geopolitics.”

  “You started a war.”

  “I started a war to protect my granddaughter. There’s a difference.”

  “Men and women are going to die because of a lie you told them,” Robin said.

  “I made a move for our future,” the President said.

  “The reason is wrong.”

  “The reason doesn’t matter.”

  “How can you say that?” Robin asked.

  “By remembering each and every person imperiled by the rise of the People’s Republic of China, and not just the civilians living under communist rule. Did you know they’ve been experimenting on frags?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “How can you say that?” the President asked.

  “Fuck you.”

  “In China, people like you vanish every day. Our intelligence says the government is trying to edit the Erodium mutation out of the gene pool. They’re close too. Soon there will be no one left like you.”

  “You think that justifies a war based on a lie?” Robin asked. “Tell the truth and we could have the same outcome.”

  “If it’s the same outcome, why does it matter?” the President asked.

  Outside, a gale bent the trees and the water in the same direction.

  “You’re betting that if I bring Lyla back from the dead and tell the truth,” the President said, “that the investigations from the media and the outrage from the public will shut the program down and she won’t go missing. I admire your faith. I wish I still had some. But the fact is, truth isn’t enough for most people. The story would hit headlines for a week, maybe two. Who knows, the public might even wise up and pay attention longer than that. Protest, fundraise, petition. Congress might even make some concessions in their next budget proposal. Less money to the DoD, more money to something sweet that’ll satiate voters. But the people who wield power like a wand will hold the line, the story will fade, and then, when no one is looking, my granddaughter will go missing, and no one will even notice.”

  Robin looked at the ground. “I can’t let you do this.”

  “I think you can,” the President said.

  “You had to have known what I would do. I can’t just bury this.”

  “Yes you can.”

  “You don’t know me.” Robin said.

  “Actually I do. I know that when you were the same age as Lyla, you went into A-Cad. You know what it’s like. Severed from your family, pruned of emotions. Now imagine no one knew where you were, and those in charge, well, they could do what they want. You’re telling me you’re going to hand a little girl the same sentence you already suffered?”

  “You knew,” Robin said, the realization hitting her. “You knew that if it ever came to this, if I knew everything, I would walk away. Because I always walk away. That’s why you picked me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let her go, Molly.”

  “Answer the question. Do you want her to have the life you had,” the President asked, “or the one you wish you had?”

  More wind shrieked through the trees. She saw it now. Her entire life had been leading to this moment. A choice. Leave, and give Lyla Walker the life Robin Wray had never had, or take the girl, return her to the world of the living, and risk condemning her to a life even worse than the NIF, all in the hope that the truth still meant something, no matter how horrific.

  Robin couldn’t look at the President. “Please don’t make me do this.”

  “I’m sorry.�
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  Robin looked at the bedroom door. Behind it she knew Lyla wasn’t playing or reading, because back when Robin was a girl she’d been smart enough to eavesdrop on her parents bickering about what to do with their daughter. How to help her, how to save her. How to save themselves.

  Her life had been chosen for her. When she was the same age as Lyla she’d been swept from society, buried in an institution, molded into someone she didn’t know or like. Lyla might have it worse if Robin told the truth to the rest of the world. The girl would be flung into the spotlight, but when it died down, they could take her, the anonymous monsters that had already taken nine other kids. Somehow, someway.

  The last time Robin saw her mother, wrought with dementia, frail and forgetful in the nursing home her daughter had put her in, unable to even speak, was on a cold bright day in winter, the sky a pale blue but bereft of clouds. She found her mother in a wheelchair by the window, swathed in a blanket, staring out at a world she no longer remembered. Robin brought over a tray of food. A bowl of soup and a plate of bread. It took a while for her mother to notice her, but when she did, her eyes remained the same. She couldn’t identify her daughter. All the woman did was open her mouth and wait for the other woman to spoon soup inside. Which was what Robin did. She fed her mother. For a long time she thought that moment was all they’d ever had together, a devastatingly mundane ending, the only thing worthwhile from the woman she came from. But if she dug deeper, with a clear head and an open heart, and courage in the face of nihilistic fear, she saw her other memories too, from the achingly gorgeous beginning. Soccer with untied laces her mother would retie anytime she ran off the field in the middle of a game. Birthdays with smeared icing and a mountain of torn wrapping paper that her mother used to cocoon her up like a caterpillar. Video games with one can of soda and one bowl of chips and an extra of each if she beat her mother. Homework with markers and stickers that devolved her mother into a color plastered queen.

  “I’m sorry,” Robin said, looking at the President. “I wish I could let her go. I really do. But I can’t bury it. I just can’t.”

  The President heaped stoicism atop her shock and grit her teeth. “You know what this means,”